COLUMN ONE : What Next for the Children? : Understanding the rioting and the King case verdicts that preceded it is vital to their recovery from the social and psychological trauma of last week.

Years from now, historians and educators will look back on the spring of 1992 as a defining moment for the children of Los Angeles.

As the city struggles to rebuild itself in the wake of the nation’s worst civil unrest in this century, its children face their own healing process--and the city’s future may rest on the lessons they draw.

The complicated dimensions of the situation--the beating of a black man by white police officers, the not guilty verdicts handed down by a mostly white jury, the violence that seemed to be aimed at Asian-American shopkeepers in black and Latino neighborhoods--pose a dilemma, but also an opportunity, for adults who will have to answer children’s tough questions about who is right, who is wrong and why it happened.

“One of the ‘good news’ things about what has just happened in Los Angeles is that this is the sort of experience that shapes moral development in children,” said James Garbarino, a Chicago psychologist and author of a book to be released this week, “Children in Danger: Coping With the Consequences of Community Violence.”

“We can enhance it, or we can suppress it,” Garbarino said. “It will depend on what we as adults say and do over the course of the next days and weeks and months.”

Experts in child development and race relations from around the country who watched events unfold in Los Angeles over the past week are preparing to help children begin the long and arduous process of recovery, a process under way in many homes and classrooms.

Some parents have tried to shield their children from the horror of what happened by turning off the television or leaving town.

Ashley Denny, the 8-year-old daughter of the white trucker beaten senseless in the first hours of the riot, was kept from watching television by her mother, Shelley Montez, who told the child only that “people took their anger out on daddy and he’s in the hospital now and that’s the safest place he can be.”

Other parents’ frustrations have been mirrored in their children. Nicholas Chitty, 7, who lives in Ladera Heights, an affluent black neighborhood near shopping districts that were destroyed, felt his emotions overflow while he helped his mother bake cookies last weekend. Pounding the dough, he exclaimed: “This is what they are doing to our community!”

In some cases, anger has spilled out in tears and racial epithets. For some, the bitterness is aimed at politicians and police; for others, the villains are arsonists and looters.

“I’m angry at the African people because they went crazy . . . and burned down the garage where my father worked,” said a 10-year-old Korean-American girl who attended a massive peace march in Koreatown with her family on Saturday. “I’m afraid that now we’re going to be poor.”

Some children found themselves standing with their parents on shifting moral ground. In parts of the city, parents took their children out to loot one day and on neighborhood cleanup missions the next.

How children are to make sense of what has happened in Los Angeles when the adults they count on are confused and bewildered is a question that looms for many families.

Tom and Bridgette Hoxie, a black couple living in South Los Angeles, had one immediate answer.

After two days at home praying while fires ravaged nearby stores and restaurants, they took their children, ages 3, 5 and 6, to help clean up the corner where Denny was nearly beaten to death.

“We have to get this city back together,” said Tom Hoxie, as he swept a grocery store parking lot and shoveled debris into an overflowing bin. “We need to give our children some kind of hope.”

The Hoxies were joined by others, not only blacks from their neighborhood, but Latinos, Anglos and Asian-Americans from throughout the city.

The multiracial cleanup effort is a hopeful first step and a way to help children regain a sense of control, said Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatry professor well known for his research on children. But it may not be enough to prevent bigotry and serious emotional problems in some children.

The next steps will be harder--to identify those children who are in crisis, to teach those untouched by the violence to empathize, and to see to it that this generation of youth understands better than their elders the complex web of problems that led to riots across the country, Poussaint and other experts say.

“You can’t talk about ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘we should all work together’ and not address the underlying problems,” said Dr. James P. Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale University and co-author with Poussaint of the book, “Black Child Care.”

“If we get into the year 2000 without having articulated a commitment to make some changes in this society, we’re going to have psychological problems as a nation that will lead us straight downhill,” Comer said.

The children who need the most immediate help are those who, even before last week’s uprising, have been constantly exposed to violence.

There is “a common-sense idea that kids who already live tough lives are inoculated to violence,” Garbarino said. In fact, research has shown the opposite.

“We’re placing these kids at a very high risk for getting hurt or hurting someone else,” said Dr. James Rosenberg, chief psychiatric resident at UCLA. “We’re talking about huge numbers of people. . . . If they don’t receive some kind of care, you might be talking about 10% to 20% of children (in Los Angeles) being at risk.”

Of the children who witnessed the fires and looting firsthand, as many as one-third may develop “serious psychological problems,” Rosenberg said.

In a recent pilot study, Dr. Eugene L. Jennings, a UCLA psychiatrist, examined the effects of gang violence on the people of South Los Angeles. He found that 25% of the 73 people studied--a much higher number than anticipated--suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychiatric ailment sometimes seen among soldiers returning from war.

Symptoms include recurring nightmares, difficulty concentrating, feelings of estrangement and a host of other problems that make it difficult to succeed in school, hold down a job or maintain normal relationships with friends or family.

Those problems will only intensify in the wake of the riot, Jennings said.

“Six months or a year from now we’re going to see a lot of kids unable to concentrate in school or ‘acting out,’ ” he said. “They’ll steal or become violent. Or maybe they’ll experience ‘psychic numbing.’ They’ll just shut down emotionally. They won’t feel. They won’t care. When it happens, people will say: ‘Wow, that kid suddenly went bad. And no one will know why. They won’t connect what is happening then to what went on before.”

To counteract these problems, a number of trauma and violence experts around the city have volunteered to go into schools to screen children and provide specialized counseling. Among them are two leading trauma experts: Dr. Spencer Eth, director of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Psychological Trauma Center, and Dr. Fawzy I. Fawzy, of the department of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine.

A UCLA team specializing in crisis intervention shortly will also begin to train staff in the Head Start program at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in South-Central Los Angeles.

But the experts’ concerns are not limited to those children in areas directly affected by the unrest. Suburban youngsters who struggled in the first few days to comprehend the verdict, then the graphic televised images of violence that resulted, are at risk of developing a superficial picture of what happened.

In the past few years, Los Angeles schools have been plagued by a resurgence of racial intolerance--fights between groups of blacks and Latinos, anti-Semitic vandalism, Asian bashing and the emergence of all-white social clubs in response to the growing minority presence on campuses.

So far, most schools--hobbled by budget cuts--have done very little to defuse the tension. In fact, many campuses have eliminated programs intended to foster multiculturalism. In some cases, it is unclear whether the efforts have been effective; in others, it is clear they have not. On several campuses, Cinco de Mayo and black history programs intended to celebrate ethnic differences have sparked racial clashes among students.

But unless schools develop comprehensive plans to reduce prejudice among students, more conflicts could arise in the coming weeks and months, warned Louise Derman-Sparks, a researcher at Pacific Oaks College who has written an anti-bias curriculum being used in schools throughout the country.

“There’s a lot of anger and hurt and a lot of racial tension among kids right now,” Derman-Sparks said. “We have to do something immediately to help them heal because the feelings are very raw.”

Parents and teachers need to be careful that their responses to the past week’s events do not encourage the formation of stereotypes. The key, experts agree, is empathy: teaching children to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, to understand how they feel and why they might have acted as they did. That may require adults to examine their own reactions.

Upon hearing her parents’ reaction to the Rodney G. King verdicts, a preschool child of liberal white parents in Brentwood concluded “Oh, so we’re rooting for the blacks and against the police.”

“While there may be some truth in that for the parents,” said Garbarino, “it is important that the parents not leave it there for the child. Rather, they need to go on and explain, ‘No, the police aren’t always bad, but in this case they behaved very badly, and it makes us angry or sad,’ or whatever it is you feel.”

Similarly, help is also critical for a 12-year-old Simi Valley boy who is afraid of black people, according to his father. He needs to be taught that not all blacks or Latinos are looters and arsonists, which he has concluded from watching television news.

“There’s a hard-core group (of adults) out there that’s very bigoted and all these things will reinforce their bigotry,” Derman-Sparks said.

“But there’s a larger group that’s really confused and has been stirred by what’s happening. . . . The verdict was a way of slapping people in the face, people who may have been denying all along that there are very serious problems in this country,” she said.

Now, parents and teachers must “commit to helping children learn about the major groups that are in our society and work with them to start challenging prejudice and bias,” she said. “They have to look at how their own families may have been denying the realities of our society and find ways through their churches or synagogues or whatever to make changes.”

According to a Times Poll, 81% of people in Los Angeles disagreed with the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial. But many of those same people have accused Mayor Tom Bradley and other local politicians of inciting violence with their strong denunciations of the verdicts.

However, Comer and other child-development experts say it is important for all children--but particularly for black youth who are likely to feel both anger and shame over the past week’s events--to hear community leaders acknowledge the perceived failure of the judicial system.

“We have to let children know they have every right to be angry because the system failed,” Comer said. “They look to the courts and the police and the government to protect people, and they were let down,” both by the verdict and the inability of police to control the arson and looting. “It’s as if their parents failed to protect them.”

At the same time, Comer and other experts agree, children must be told that the violence and looting that followed the verdict were wrong.

The televised images of parents emerging from ransacked stores carrying stolen goods--with tiny children in tow--has proved troubling to many. But some psychologists say that for young children, the involvement of their parents in a single incident of looting may not adversely affect their moral development.

“If your parents are doing it and you aren’t old enough to know it’s a big deal, you won’t think anything of it,” said Dr. Charles Figley, a researcher at Florida State University and editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress.

It poses more problems for older children, Figley said, because it challenges their notions of right and wrong and casts their parents in the role of criminals. “It’s much more serious for them. . . . Basically, they’ll tend to mirror their parents,” he said.

Experts are cautiously optimistic that young people will get the help they need. There are many people reaching out--ministers, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists--to help children cope with their intense feelings.

The problem, said UCLA’s Jennings, is that unlike the campaign to rebuild the city that Peter V. Ueberroth will lead, the effort to help children recover from the strife has no chief to make sure the vital services reach all the children who need them.

Times staff writer Stephanie Chavez contributed to this story.